Cleopatra's Needle in Central Park, Oct. 2007

Cleopatra's Needles are a trio of obelisks in London, Paris, and New York City. Each is made of red granite, stands about 21 metres (68 feet) high, weighs about 180 tons and is inscribed with Egyptian hieroglyphs. Although the needles are genuine Ancient Egyptian obelisks, they are somewhat misnamed as none has any connection with queen Cleopatra VII of Egypt. They were originally erected in the Egyptian city of Heliopolis on the orders of Thutmose III, around 1450 BC. The material of which they were cut is granite, brought from the quarries of Aswan, near the first cataract of the Nile. The inscriptions were added about 200 years later by Ramesses II to commemorate his military victories. The obelisks were moved to Alexandria and set up in the Caesarium — a temple built by Cleopatra in honor of Mark Antony — by the Romans in 12 BC, during the reign of Augustus, but were toppled some time later. This had the fortuitous effect of burying their faces and so preserving most of the hieroglyphs from the effects of weathering.

The New York needle is in Central Park ( 40°46′46.67″N, 73°57′55.44″W). It was after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 that Ismail Pasha, the Khedive of Egypt, first mentioned the gift of one of the Obelisks to the United States in the hope of cultivating trade relations, but it was formally given in a letter dated May 18, 1879 by his son Tewfik Pasha. And even then it wasn’t erected in Central Park until January 22, 1881. Railroad magnate William H. Vanderbilt financed the project and the formidable task of moving the Obelisk from Alexandria to New York was given to Henry Honychurch Gorringe, a lieutenant commander of the U.S. Navy. The move took a decade to complete. According to Central Park’s website the 244 ton granite needle was first shifted from vertical to horizontal, then put into the hold of the decommissioned steamship Dessoug, across the Mediterranean Sea, then over the storm-tossed Atlantic Ocean without stop. The obelisk's base rode on the deck at the stern. It took four months just to bring it from the banks of the Hudson River to Staten Island, finally arriving on 20 July 1880. The final leg of the journey was made across a specially built trestle bridge from Fifth Avenue to its new home on Greywacke Knoll, just across the drive from the then recently built Metropolitan Museum of Art. At its base are four 900-pound, 19th-century bronze replicas of crabs, which were first placed there by the Romans and are on display in the Met.

Text from: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleopatra's_Needle